29 March 2007 | As one of a number of initiatives aimed at further improvements in accountability and transparency, ICANN engaged One World Trust to undertake an independent review of standards of accountability and transparency within ICANN. ...

29 March 2007 | ICANN has changed the method by which it draws input into its public meetings — including the public forum — in an effort to make it easier to interact, and hence encourage greater interaction ...

26 March 2007 | ICANN today introduces a new website with better navigation and new features. "ICANN is committed to being more transparent and accessible" said Paul Levins, ICANN's Executive Officer and Vice President, Corporate Affairs. "Reform of our website is a key part of that commitment."

26 March 2007 | This factsheet will explain why and how the RegisterFly problem arose, give an explanation of the current system, and discuss possible solutions to prevent a similar failure from happening again. ...

26 March 2007 | ICANN's 28th International meeting opened today in Lisbon, Portugal. It will see important developments in the organization's mission of global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers ...

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Domain Name System

Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."